Tomorrow's Business Today
How much is Elon Musk worth if he saves the world?
What chief executives get paid used to be a big deal.
It made us cross. The pay was unmerited, the bonus packages a joke.
The Guardian liked to argue that rewards for CEOs were now so outrageous that there would soon be a City rebellion against those deals.
This goes on the list of things The Guardian wanted to happen, so acted like therefore it inevitably would.
Hmm. Not yet.
At this point the debate about what UK CEOs get seems particularly sterile, out of date even.
Since the CEO of Google might get $692m, getting annoyed that Lloyds boss Charlie Nunn is paid £7m seems rather behind the times.
A curious leader column in the FT the other day fretted about how much Elon Musk might make once SpaceX floats on the stock market.
At 200,000 pages long, the SpaceX prospectus is “surely the most audacious ever published”. Among other things, Musk plans to harness the sun to power, well, everything.
The FT gets sniffy at this point.
“Traditional governance checks are almost entirely absent. Musk already runs carmaker Tesla and had a chaotic stint as adviser to US President Donald Trump. Here, a two-tier shareholder structure common to tech firms is even more heavily weighted in the founder’s favour. He will have a virtually unchallengeable grip on voting rights and the board.”
Well, yeah.
And if you don’t like that, don’t buy the shares. Index funds might be obliged to, but if you are really upset at what Elon Musk will get paid, don’t buy the index fund either.
Treating SpaceX as if it were just any other company misses the point.
Musk’s goal is to save humanity from itself. As part of that, he wants to send rockets to Mars and set off thermonuclear bombs that will change Mars’s climate to make it liveable for humans.
He might be nuts.
But as corporate visions go, it beats the hell out of a plan to increase market share by 3% a quarter on a recurring basis.
If Musk fails in his bid to save the Earth and humankind, then his shares are worth the same as everyone else’s. Nothing.
If he succeeds, well, he can have his $10 trillion, can’t he?
Talking about Musk and the rest through the usual corporate governance lens doesn’t make much sense.
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